Worlds a-part

a letter to one once loved

1.

Half the globe, 35,000 feet, and 7 months. That’s the distance. 

I still scroll through old photos. Read old texts. Rip the stitches open. I kept the glass ice cream jar with the folded sticky notes and the postcard from Tofino and the anklets we wove on the warm and windy balcony in Cinque Terre. I marvel at how alien that version of me now feels.

I still listen to those folk songs we found. I still make the same jokes—under my breath—but think “Ah you would’ve thought that was funny”. I still keep our language alive. Although it’s rusty now. I’m out of practice. 

It’s like I can’t let myself forget. It’s like I want to remember everything. 

Our lives were wound together so neatly at school. Then, with the sunshine, the thaw of the earth, and the bursts of pink buds growing on the trees, the last semester ended¹. And there were just loose ends, fraying in our fingers, like twine. 

I told myself we couldn’t grow together, so we grew apart.

It’s my fault for thinking love is like Fall in southern Ontario—perfect for a moment, before it turns right into shit.

2.

All the small acts of kindness feel bigger now. Especially at the end, when we knew it was too far to fix. When you got up with me at 6 to edit my essay with foggy eyes. Ironed my shirt for that dinner I was invited to you were more excited for than I was. Lent me your Garmin. 

It was just a thread of kindness we held onto, when kindness no longer mattered².

That’s the hardest part: we knew it was broken but couldn’t fix it. You wanted explanations, justification, logic. Something to solve. I had nothing. I still have nothing. Just an aftertaste of stomach acid from a gut feeling. 

We were slow dancing in a burning building, holding on, trying to protect each other from the blaze³. Clinging to a desperate singular belief that the foundation was still solid. That this all wasn’t real. That all we needed was a dusting and the amnesic scent of Pine Sol. That we’d wake up tomorrow and all the hurt would be swept away with the morning light. 

I told myself you’d be better off. Maybe not in a month but definitely a year. You just couldn’t see it. You always were so stubborn—like me. You always told me you weren’t going anywhere. Even to the end.

All my bravery, rehearsed words, wilted when I looked into those earnest eyes. I was afraid to follow through. Afraid to let us come undone. Avoiding the ache of knowing everything was about to change.

You told me a storm never knows why it’s coming. But still, it does.

3.

Recently, I’ve been remembering Rome. How we walked the coliseum and lived off bread and cheese and got lost in the rain. Pushed our single beds together although you’d always be on my side. 

Doesn’t it feel like a different life? 

Lately I don’t even feel as if I lived with you those four months in Spain. Like you were somehow a stranger. Someone I never really knew. Like we were just a youthful dream. 

4.

That night. That night is burned in my memory. How you said, between shaky breaths, you didn’t know it would be the last dinner I would cook for you. You didn’t want it to be our last walk. And with hot wet cheeks you asked me to hold you. 

And, after the decision had been made, I washed my face in your bathroom and I cut an apple we picked at and made a bad joke about how we’ll finally understand the sad songs on our playlist now. You packed me a bag. My hockey sweater. The frozen peas you bought so I could ice my shins after long runs. The French press you insisted I take. And I hung at the door like a prisoner delaying death row. Looking in at a recently old life. Staring back at an unfamiliar face, like an open casket. Silence screamed between us. Everything had been said. Knowing I had to walk to the elevator but not wanting the door to close. I didn’t want to say goodbye. 

But, after seconds that dragged like sandpaper, I left. Walked down Bathurst with my backpack full of books slipping off my sore shoulders and my bag of memories. And the condensation from the peas tore a hole in the paper bag and everything spilled out onto the sidewalk.

That night you told me you wish it was us. That it was us that settled down to a quiet life. I never told you that I wish it was us, too. It still makes me sad that it couldn’t be. 

We could’ve been soulmates, if only our souls were a slightly different shape. 

In a thousand alternate realities, we’d still be together in a bunch. Just not this one. 

That night we put the pen down on our story. There are so many chapters we will never get to write. 

5.

I forgot how we kept talking after. Checking in, like old friends watching the other go through a tough time. I’m proud of how we protected old love from bad blood. 

It would be easier to forget if I scorched my past. If I called you crazy. Marred your memory with blame. If I said it was all a mistake or I was blind the whole time. But I know that’s not true. Sometimes two good people just can’t make it work anymore. I learned that from my parents. 

Life isn’t that black and white. There’s a kaleidoscope of color. 

When we met for coffee in the back of that wild, ivy-laden patio it was weird to sit there and be close to you and not touch you. The weight of history and a shaky cast iron table between us. All the forgotten promises that couldn’t be kept. But smiling at it still. Then we walked down Queen and I bought you tulips from the market—just like you used to always bug me about never doing. You pretended not to want them. But, after everything, it was beautiful in a bitter kind of way. 

The last time I saw you was the night of the concert we had tickets for that I let you keep. Your friends said not to invite me but you did anyway. After, we ran through a crowd so I could catch my train home. And the doors were closing and a pack of people rushed on but I turned back to give you a hug. And then you melted into the mass of faces and the train pulled away and I left you at the station. Standing there. To walk back to your apartment in the dark. 

You never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory. 

6.

Home for the holidays, a friend asked if I’m seeing someone new as we drove on the highway. I shook my head side to side. Murmured a hesitant, drawn-out “No… ???” with an inflection at the end, to make the question’s mere existence seem silly. Deranged. 

I’m figuring out how to be alone. To be okay with that. I’m figuring out who I am without your handprints all over me.

But I’m sure you’ve moved on. The city moves too fast not to. It has a memory of mere moments.

In December I went to a classical music concert at Roy Thompson with a friend. The pub was full and we walked down Adelaide and she spotted your favorite cafe. The one with the yellow and white striped awning, across from your office. And I thought “That’s just cruel”. We sat in and I swear I barely breathed. Cutting my eyes from wall to wall, like a convict waiting to be shanked⁴. And later, during Tchaikovsky’s crescendo, I looked over and, in a flash, saw you sitting there instead. 

After Christmas, I went downtown one flurried night to meet friends. Walking down Front Street, an eerily vacant space by my side. Playing Euchre, I was half in the room, half staring out the window at the slow river of cars and the white powder that came sailing down, changing color under the street lamps into a haloed gold, melting on the glossy wet road. 

The city still feels like you. You’re all over this place. It still tastes like a life that almost existed, growing further away each day, perched on some distant quivering branch. 

Now we’re just an echo. A lost fragment of some precious attempt to shout into the void. 

I hope, one day, we can meet at one of our cafes. Talk about old times, like I do with my high school friends. With nothing but reverence and sullen sweetness. 

7.

It’s been 7 months. Yesterday and forever ago.

I think about all the life you’ve lived since then. About all the days at work I haven’t heard about and new cafes you found and friends from running. About a world that was nearly as intimate as my own, now foreign, floating in another galaxy. I wonder how much of you I’d recognize. 

I’m not sure if I should be writing about this, but I don’t know what else to do with it. Each time I open a blank word doc or turn a new page in my journal, it’s the sinkhole my words circle. 

I said I would write you a letter. You kept waiting, even when you knew it wasn’t coming. I thought of telling you to keep it until you woke up one morning, fresh with the conviction to burn it. Watch the corners of the page curl and the ink plume up in smoke. I thought it was poetic.

Now I’m on a plane. Heading to the other side of the world. Writing cold northeastern prose. Thinking about how much I loved you before I didn’t.

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Thank you

Haley Brengartner

for helping put the final polish on this piece and reminding me to be brave in my writing.

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👋 what i’ve been up to:

• I flew to Thailand! I’ll spend a month in Phuket, an island in the South, mostly writing and reading (and relaxing??). I’m excited to expand into my writing, explore The Bible, and return to photography. I also joined a CrossFit gym which nearly killed me the first few workouts.

• 2024 has been a bad year for being terminally online. I Pavlov-dogged myself into checking notifications every few minutes. I reorganized my home page, started using an app called Opal to restrict screen time, and turned on grayscale. The less I use my phone, the more I enjoy my life.

✍️ quote i’m pondering:

Elementary school teacher and author Bruce Coville on love:

"Nothing you love is lost. Not really.

Things, people—they always go away, sooner or later. You can't hold them, any more than you can hold moonlight. But if they've touched you, if they're inside you, then they're still yours.

The only things you ever really have are the ones you hold inside your heart."

📸 photos i took:

around phuket, thailand

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You got all my love,

Tommy

1. Reference to a line in Great Gatsby on life beginning over again: “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

2. Inspired by the final, heart-crushing line of Ruth Lepson’s poem The Day of Our Divorce Hearing: “But I remember our kindness that day, when it no longer mattered”

3. Inspired by John Mayer’s iconic song “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room”. A metaphor for the end of a relationship.

4. Inspired by a line from DFW’s essay on Roger Federer: “cutting his eyes warily from side to side like a convict expecting to be shanked”